BYOC: Should employees buy their own computers?

[aerius]

[...cloud computing...]

It also means management can tell you to work from home, saving the company some cash around the office. Plus, of course you will pay for your own broadband connection you need to access the company servers.

They'll just have to pay you more, then.

It's ecologically effective, anyway since you aren't commuting to the office every day.

Nope. It means they can now outsource your job to India. Once they find out you can do your job remotely, they'll hire someone in India to do the same job for 10% of what they're paying you, at which point you're let go.

[General Zod]

Does anyone have an actual cost/benefit analysis of virtualizing everything? I'm skeptical that setting up expensive servers and virtualization software plus hiring IT guys to maintain the servers and virtualization software is somehow cheaper than just buying $600 desktops for each employee every 3 or 4 years.

[Hamstray]

I don't know if your reply is sarcasm or not, but even if isn't, it's still misguided. Office applications are just an example. There is plenty of other software which does not have significantly higher computational or memory requirements, either.

There is plenty of software that does however.

[Ryan Thunder]

Nope. It means they can now outsource your job to India. Once they find out you can do your job remotely, they'll hire someone in India to do the same job for 10% of what they're paying you, at which point you're let go.

Except that I'm still cheaper, because I actually produce working code instead of shitty code that takes eleven times as long to make it into production because of all the bugs they just can't be fucked to fix on their own initiative.

[HankSolo]

For anyone in an engineering or design field, they're plentiful. Good luck getting any kind of Autodesk product to run properly in a virtual environment.

Oh, I know that, but nevertheless those kind of jobs are a relatively small minority of all corporate personal computer users.

For most of the last decade, almost all the electrical engineering design/simulation that I've seen has been done on large farms(LSF) or remote workstations. There's a lot of bang for buck in keeping those kinds of systems (the single job 32-512GB ones) shared. Maybe the Autodesk crowd still keeps things local.

I usually find it more convenient to use a personal laptop of my choice and VNC/RemoteDesktop into my desk PC, even when I could handle things locally.

Nope. It means they can now outsource your job to India. Once they find out you can do your job remotely, they'll hire someone in India to do the same job for 10% of what they're paying you, at which point you're let go.

Except that I'm still cheaper, because I actually produce working code instead of shitty code that takes eleven times as long to make it into production because of all the bugs they just can't be fucked to fix on their own initiative.

I'd say it is more like 30% now, except for very entry level tasks. Tack on a couple years of 10%+ inflation and things won't seem so attractive.